Bizarre array create error

Hi I'm trying to assign two fields of an object returned from a MySQL query and have stumbled upon the most bizarre PHP bug where I can't create two arrays in succession. Here's the MySQL query with two dummy fields to be filled in later select *, 0 as dummy_1, 0 as dummy_2 from table Here's how I'm grabbing the query results $result = array(); while ($row = mysql_fetch_object($query_result)) { $result[] = $row; } Once that's done, I try to set two of the rows to arrays like this $result-> dummy_1 = array(1, 2, 3, 4); $result-> dummy_2 = array('a', 'b', 'c', 'd'); If I comment out either of the above lines, the script works but with both uncommented, it seems to drop dead. It doesn't even return an error. I rebooted my system thinking PHP might have gotten into a funky state but that didn't work. I retyped the function from scratch but it still breaks on these two lines. I did a "show invisibles" and "show spaces" in BBEdit to see if there was a hidden character, none found. I did a hex dump to see if there was a hidden character that BBEdit was missing, nope. And I haven't upgraded PHP in a year so it's not a question of an unstable update. I've been doing assignments like the above for 3 years and never had a problem and in fact the exact same function works perfectly in another script.This one has me utterly stumped. Anyone have an idea what might be causing this? Or something else I could try to glean more info about the failure? Thanks in advance Ken